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BY 花消英氣 from 21st Century Published 2022-04-29 |
A panoramic view of FAST in Guizhou province, China. XINHUA
The story of The Three-Body Problem follows how humans contact aliens in a faraway solar system. Liu Cixin’s modern sci-fi classic shows that after making contact, people on Earth will face many problems – including the danger of invasion! Similar to the novel, a team from the United States’ NASA space agency, led by scientist Jonathan Jiang, wants to send a new message into the stars. According to Scientific American, the technology needed to send the message is not yet ready. Regardless, the scientists hope humanity can now have a serious discussion about if and how we should talk to aliens, reported the US-based science magazine. Even if we send a message, none of us will be around for the reply. It will take millennia to reach the target galaxy. So, why should we send it at all? “We want … to say, ‘Hey, we are here,’ even if we are not here some years later,” Jiang, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, told Live Science. Humans have long sought ways to contact other worlds. In the early 19th century, Austrian astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow said we should communicate with space by making giant geometric patterns in the sands of the Sahara Desert, filling them with kerosene and lighting them on fire. It never happened, but the invention of radio has allowed us to try other ways to communicate, said Live Science. According to Scientific American, there remains a basic problem: what do we say and how? Nearly all the messages humans have sent so far start with some basic science and math information – two topics that aliens with a radio telescope would understand. How do we send our messages? As early as 1974, a team sent a radio message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It was an image, in binary code, of a cartoon person and some chemistry diagrams. Three years later, the two capsules on Voyager spacecraft, launched by NASA, carry golden phonograph records full of images and sounds of Earth. Images in binary code are called “bitmaps”. They allow “the maximum amount of information … in the minimal amount of message”, according to Jiang. Will the NASA team use bitmaps? Jiang hopes not. “With improvements in digital technology, we can do much better,” he said.  (Translator & Editor: Li Xinzhu AND Luo Sitian)
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